Frank Berry's Storage Blog Archives for March 2010

Thanks to Verizon and their successful "There's A Map For That" commercials, technology companies believing they have a distinct competitive edge, are feeling emboldened to follow their lead. And thanks to AT&T, victims of this type of advertising are suing and counter-attacking. AT&T publically claimed the ads were "blatantly false and misleading," then filed a false advertising lawsuit. The company is now counter-attacking with their "Side by Side" commercials that compare the overall 3G experience with AT&T versus Verizon.



Did AT&T's legal strategy work? No, because a federal judge declined to file a restraining order against Verizon. They also lost in the court of public opinion. In court filings Verizon said, "AT&T did not file this lawsuit because Verizon's 'There's A Map For That' advertisements are untrue; AT&T sued because Verizon's ads are true and the truth hurts." I believe they wrote this because they knew it clearly reflected general public opinion.


A similar battle is now being waged in the sleepy Snorage Area Networking (SAN) market where Emulex is running their "Hot Enough to Fry and Egg" commercial. Following the AT&T playbook, QLogic filed a lawsuit against Emulex and is counter-attacking with "What's the Secret Sauce for FCoE" ads.


Did QLogic's legal strategy work? It's too early to tell because the case has not gone to court yet, but thanks to publicity surrounding the lawsuit, the little noticed "Hot Enough to Fry and Egg" commercial has been viewed over 16,000 times.


My opinion is, like it or not, Verizon has set the precedent that attack ads are effective with consumers and hard to defend. Furthermore, right or wrong, lawsuits have proven to be a Public Relations disaster for the filing company. They serve mostly to drive large numbers of customers to the enemy's attack ad.



I'd like to know what you think about attack ad strategies and the ads themselves in an online survey (one lucky respondent is going to win an iPad). I also invite you to alert me about other skirmishes that are being fought in our industry with this type of advertising. I plan on publishing a follow-up article covering results of the survey along with an update on the battles being fought.

The first system administrator to ever upgrade a server undoubtedly experienced a mismatch in performance between the installed server and the new component. Since then, millions of data center managers have experienced first-hand the performance bottleneck constantly moving from one component in their data center to another. Have those millions of years of experience stopped smart people in our industry from challenging whether it makes sense to deploy new generations of faster technology -- because the new technology has performance the rest of the system can’t use? The answer is “no,” and the latest generation of high performance converged network adapters is a great case-in-point.


Recent press releases, test reports and webcasts from Broadcom, IT Brand Pulse, Microsoft and Intel have included references to performance of 1 million inputs/outputs per second (IOPS). The reflex reaction from many in the industry was, “this level of performance is meaningless.” The reason they believe 1 million IOP performance is meaningless is because is most servers, storage and applications can’t use that much I/O capacity. They’re absolutely correct that most servers, storage and applications can’t use the performance. But they’re wrong about the additional performance being meaningless. All things being equal, data center managers prefer to buy the newest, fastest equipment in order to future-proof their environment.


If you’re shopping for a car and the sales person offers you a choice of a Gremlin and a Porsche for the same price, are you going to argue the additional performance can’t be used on the roads you drive, and choose the Gremlin? No, you’re going to drive away in the Porsche and let the other poor S.O.B. explain why he bought the Gremlin. Similarly, in a recent survey of over 100 IT professionals, 77% said, all things being equal, they would buy Adapter A that did 1 million IOPS and was twice as fast as Adapter B. Furthermore, 36% of the respondents said they would even move off the standard adapter platform.


In 2002 LSI announced the ability of their Ultra320 SCSI host bus adapters to support 100,000 IOPS. Their competitors rightfully pointed out that no server or storage could feed the beast with that much I/O. However, the product was successful because storage administrators wanted the fastest storage controller they could get. In 2010, 10 gigabit network adapter manufacturers need to achieve 1,000,000 IOPS performance because converged network administrators responsible for virtual server environments will expect it. And around 2015 when 100 gigabit Ethernet becomes mainstream, I expect many will challenge why anyone will ever need 10 million IOPS.

On February 26, Emulex announced that its OneConnect™ Universal Converged Network Adapters are available from HP. This is significant for three reasons. First, it’s a massive opportunity given that HP is the largest OEM consumer of host adapters in the world. Second, time-to-sales will be quick since the new HP-branded products are available for high-volume HP ProLiant rack, tower and blade servers. And third, this marks a ground floor opportunity for Emulex. These products are the first host adapters available from HP to support Data Center Bridging (DCB) – a technology that underpins converged networks that will dominate the future.

Available for LAN and SAN Applications

One metric of success for new converged networking equipment like host adapters, is their ability to support more than one of the previously separate Local Area Network (LAN), Storage Area Network (SAN), or low-latency High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. In spite of what the vendors will tell you, most DCB adapters and switches on the market today are really good at only one of three applications - which means data center managers still need to deploy separate networks. Emulex CNAs are being offered by HP for LAN and SAN applications which means that today Emulex is uniquely good at two of three applications. This is a big win for HP customers that want to exploit the cost advantages of converged networking by combining LAN and SAN applications onto one host adapter.

New HP 10 Gigabit Adapters from Emulex

• HP StorageWorks Converged Network Adapter – A SAN application where the CNA provides Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity to Fibre Channel storage. According to HP.com, “the new CNAs from Emulex, have been thoroughly tested with HP ProLiant servers and HP Top of Rack (ToR) switches to ensure an optimal HP FCoE solution for your datacenter.”
• 10 Gigabit Server Adapter for HP ProLiant Servers – A LAN application where the CNA s are used as traditional Network Interface Cards (NICs) with rack and tower servers. HP offers the NC550SFP from Emulex as a qualified option on most ProLiant DL and ML servers and ships with advanced server features that ProLiant customers have come to expect, including support for TCP checksum and segmentation, Large Send and Large Receive offload capability, VLAN tagging, 9K jumbo frames, IPv4 and IPv6, teaming for failover and load balancing, and TCP/IP Offload for Windows.
• 10 Gigabit Server Adapter for HP BladeSystem c-Class Servers – A LAN application where the CNAs are used as a traditional Network Interface Card (NIC) with blade servers. The HP NC550m Ethernet Adapter joins the NC550m from Broadcom as the 10 gigabit adapter options for HP’s top-of-the-line blade servers.

The term “run the table” refers to a player breaking the rack, and then pocketing all of the balls. The difference between someone who has run the table, and someone who has “run out,” is that to run the table, you must run from the break shot all of the way to victory. With the new 10 gigabit adapters on hp.com this week, HP racked up a wide variety of important design wins for adapter manufacturers, and the Emulex announcement indicates the company broke first. It’s too early to tell if Emulex is going to ride the break shot all the way to victory, but they’re on a run.